CHAPTER LXXII
Of all the consequences of that terrible dinner at Rankin's there was none that Rickman resented more than the loss of his overcoat. As he lay between his blankets he still felt all the lashings of the east wind around his shivering body. He was awake all that night, and the morning found him feverish with terror of the illness that might overtake him before he attained his end. He stayed in bed all day to prevent it, and because of his weakness, and for warmth.
But the next day there came a mild and merciful thaw, a tenderness of Heaven that was felt even under the tiles in Howland Street. And the morning of that day brought a thing that in all his dreams he had not yet dreamed of, a letter from Lucia.
He read it kneeling on the floor of his garret, supporting himself by the edge of the table. It was only a few lines in praise of the Elegy (which had appeared in The Planet the week before) and a postscript that told him she would be staying at Court House with Miss Palliser till the summer.
He knelt there a long time with his head bowed upon his arms. His brains failed him when he tried to write an answer, and he put the letter into his breast-pocket, where it lay like a loving hand against his heart. And yet there was not a word of love in it.
The old indomitable hope rose in his heart again and he forced himself to eat and drink, that he might have strength for the things he had to do. That night he did not sleep, but lay wrapt in his beatific passion. His longing was so intense that it created a vision of the thing it longed for. It seemed to him that he heard Lucia's soft footfall about his bed, that she came and sat beside his pillow, that she bowed her head upon his breast, and that her long hair drifted over him. For the beating of his own heart gave him the sense of a presence beside him all night long, as he lay with his right arm flung across his own starved body, guarding her letter, the letter that had not a word of love in it.
In the morning he discovered that another letter had lain on his table under Lucia's. It was from Dicky Pilkington, reminding him that it wanted but seven days to the thirtieth. Dicky said nothing about any willingness to renew the bill. What did it matter? Dicky would renew it, Dicky must renew it; he felt that there was force in him to compel Dicky to renew it. He went out and bought a paper with the price of a meal of milk (he couldn't pawn his good clothes; their assistance was too valuable in interviews with possible employers). He found the advertisement of an Exeter bookseller in want of a foreman and expert cataloguer at a salary of ninety pounds. He answered it by return. In the list of his credentials he mentioned that he had catalogued the Harden library (a feat, as he knew, sufficient to constitute him a celebrity in the eyes of the Exeter man). He added that if the bookseller felt inclined to consider his application he would be obliged by a wire, as he had several other situations in view.
The bookseller wired engaging him for six months. The same day came a cheque for ten pounds from The Planet, the honorarium for the Elegy. He sent the ten pounds to Dicky at once (by way of showing what he could do) with a curt note informing him of his appointment and requesting a renewal for three months, by which time his salary would cover the remainder still owing.
Feeling that no further intellectual efforts were now required of him he went out to feed on the fresh air. As he crossed the landing an odour of hot pottage came to meet him. Through the ever-open door he caught a glimpse of a woman's form throned, as it were, above clouds of curling steam. A voice went out, hoarse with a supreme emotion.
"Come in, you there, and 'ave a snack, wontcher?" it said.
"No, thank you," he answered.
"Garn then. I'll snack yer for a ——y fool!"
And from the peaceableness of the reply he gathered that this time the lady was not soliciting patronage but conferring it.
He was no longer hungry, no longer weighed upon by his exhausted body. A great restlessness had seized it, a desire to walk, to walk on and on without stopping. The young day had lured him into the Regent's Park. So gentle was the weather that, but for bare branches and blanched sky, it might have been a day in Spring. As he walked he experienced sensations of indescribable delicacy and lightness, he saw ahead of him pellucid golden vistas of metaphysical splendour, he skimmed over fields of elastic air with the ease and ecstasy of a blessed spirit.
When he came in he found that the experience prolonged itself through the early night, even when he lay motionless on his bed staring at the wall. And as he stared it seemed to him that there passed upon the wall clouds upon clouds of exquisite and evanescent colour, and that strange forms appeared and moved upon the clouds. He saw a shoal of fishes (they were fishes, radiant, iridescent, gorgeous fishes, with the tails of peacocks); they swam round and round the room just under the cornice, an ever-revolving, ever-floating frieze. He was immensely interested in these decorative hallucinations. His brain seemed to be lifted up, to be iridescent also, to swim round and round with the swimming fishes.
He woke late in the morning with a violent sore throat and pain in all his body. He was too giddy to sit up and help himself, but he knocked weakly on the thin wall. His neighbour roused herself at the faint summons and appeared. She stood at the foot of the bed with her hands on her hips and contemplated him for a moment. He tried to speak, but his tongue seemed to be stuck burning to the roof of his mouth. He pointed to his throat.
"Yes, I dessay," said she. "I said you'd get somefing and you've got it." So saying she disappeared into her own apartment.
As he saw her go despair shook him. He thought that he was abandoned. But presently she returned, bringing a cup of hot tea with a dash of gin in it from her own breakfast.
"I'd a seen to you afore ef you'd let me," she said. "You tyke it from me, young man, wot you wants is a good hot lining to your belly. I'd 'ave given it to you ef you'd a let me. I'm a lydy as tykes her dinner reg'ler, I am. No, you don't—" This, as he turned away his head in protest. She however secured it firmly with one filthy hand, while with the other she held the reeking cup to his lips. She had put it to her own first to test the heat and quality of the brew. Yet he was grateful. He had some difficulty in swallowing; and from time to time she wiped his mouth with her villainous apron; and he was grateful still, having passed beyond disgust.
She perceived the gratitude. "Garn," said she, "wot's a cup er tea? I'd a seen to yer afore ef you'd a let me."
She continued her ministrations; she brought coal in her own scuttle and after immense pains she lighted a fire in the wretched grate. Then she smoothed his bed-clothes till they were covered with her smutty trail. She would have gone for a doctor then and there, but difficulty arose. For doctors meant hospitals, and the man below threatened to sell his lodger's "sticks" if rent were not forthcoming. She cast her eyes about in search of pawnable articles. They fell upon his clothes. She took up his shirt and examined it carefully, appraising the sleeve links and the studs. But when she touched the coat, the coat that had Lucia's letter in the breast-pocket, Rickman turned in his bed and made agonizing signs, struggling with the voice that perished in his burning throat.
"Wot's the good," said she, "of a suit when yer can't wear it? As I telled you wot you wa—No, the's no sorter use your making fyces at me. And you keep your ——y legs in, or I'll—" The propositions that followed were murmured in a hoarse but crooning tone such as a mother might have used to soothe a fractious child. She went away, carrying the clothes with her, and turned out the pockets in her den.
On her return she sent the man below to fetch the doctor. But the man below fell in with boon companions on the way, and no doctor came. All that night the woman watched by Rickman's bedside, heedless of her luck. She kept life in him by feeding him with warm milk and gin, a teaspoonful at a time. Rickman, aware of footsteps in the room, fancied himself back again in Rankin's dressing-room. The whole scene of that evening floated before him all night long. He had a sense of presences hostile and offended, of being irretrievably disgraced. In the recurring nightmare he saw Lucia Harden instead of Mrs. Rankin. So persistently did he see her that when he woke he could not shake off the impression that she had been actually, if unaccountably, present, a spectator of his uttermost disgrace. He could never look her in the face again. No, for he was disgraced; absolutely, irredeemably, atrociously disgraced. Beyond all possibility of explanation and defence; though he sometimes caught himself explaining and pleading against those offended phantoms of his brain. Why should he suffer so? Just because of his inability to deal with Rankin's never-ending dinner, or to pay a debt of millions, many millions of figures that climbed up the wall. He was not sure which of these two obligations was laid upon him.
He became by turns delirious and drowsy, and the woman fetched a doctor early the next day. He found enteric and blood-poisoning also, of which Rickman's illness at the Rankins' must have been the first warning symptoms.
"He'll have to go to the hospital; but you'd better send word to his friends."
"'E ain't got no friends. And I dunno 'oo 'e is."
The doctor said to himself, "Gone under," and looked round him for a clue. He examined a postcard from Spinks and a parcel (containing an overcoat) from Rankin, with the novelist's name and address inside the wrapper. The poet's name was familiar to the doctor, who read Metropolis. He first of all made arrangements for removing his patient to the hospital. Then in his uncertainty he telegraphed to Jewdwine, to Rankin and to Spinks.
The news of Rickman's illness was thus spread rapidly among his friends. It brought Spinks that afternoon, and Flossie, the poor Beaver, dragged to Howland Street by her husband to see what her woman's hands could do. They entered upon a scene of indescribable confusion and clangour. Poppy Grace, arrived on her errand (for which she had attired herself in a red dress and ermine tippet), had mounted guard over the unconscious poet.
"Ricky," cried Poppy, bending over him, "won't you speak to me? It's Poppy, dear. Don't you know me?"
"No, 'e don't know yer, so you needn't arsk 'im."
Poppy placed her minute figure defiantly between Rickman and her rival of the open door. She had exhausted her emotions in those wild cries, and was prepared to enjoy the moment which produced in her the hallucination of self-conscious virtue.
The woman, voluble and fierce, began to describe Miss Grace's character in powerful but somewhat exaggerated language, appealing to the new-comers to vindicate her accuracy. Poppy seated herself on the bed and held a pocket-handkerchief to her virtuous nose. It was the dumb and dignified rebuke of Propriety in an ermine tippet, to Vice made manifest in the infamy of rags. The Beaver retreated in terror on to the landing, where she stood clutching the little basket of jellies and things which she had brought, as if she feared that it might be torn from her in the violence of the scene. Spinks, convulsed with anguish by the sight of his friend lying there unconscious, could only offer an inarticulate expostulation. It was the signal for the woman to burst into passionate self-defence.
"I ain't took nothing 'cept wot the boss 'e myde me. 'Go fer a doctor?' ses 'e. 'No you don't. I don't 'ave no ——y doctor messing round 'ere an' cartin' 'im orf to the 'orspital afore 'e's paid 'is rent.' Ses 'e 'I'm—"
The entrance of Maddox and Rankin checked the hideous flow. They were followed by the porters of the hospital and the nurse in charge. Her presence commanded instantaneous calm.
"There are far too many people in this room," said she. Her expelling glance fell first on Poppy, throned on the bed, then on the convulsive Spinks. She turned more gently to Rankin, in whose mouth she saw remonstrance, and to Maddox, in whose eyes she read despair. "It will really be better for him to take him to the hospital."
"No," cried Spinks, darting in again from the landing, "take him to my house, 45, Dalmeny Av—" but the Beaver plucked him by the sleeve; for she thought of Muriel Maud.
"No, no, take him to mine, 87, Sussex Square," said Rankin, and he insisted. But in the end he suffered himself to be overruled; for he thought darkly of his wife.
"I'd give half my popularity if I could save him," he said to Maddox.
"Half your popularity won't save him, nor yet the whole of it," said Maddox savagely. In that moment they hated themselves and each other for the wrong they had done him. Their hearts smote them as they thought of the brutalities of Sunday night.
The woman still held her ground in the centre of the room where she stood scowling at the nurse as she busied herself about the bed.
"I'd a seen to 'im ef 'e'd a let me," she reiterated.
Maddox dealt with her. He flicked a sovereign on to the table. "Look here," said he, "suppose you take that and go out quietly."
There was a momentary glitter in her eyes, but her fingers hesitated.
"I didn' fink 'e 'ad no frien's wen I come in." It was her way of intimating that what she had done she had not done for money.
"All right, take it."
She drew out a filthy grey flannel bag from the bosom of her gown and slipped the gold into it. And still she hesitated. She could not understand why so large a sum was offered for such slight services as she had rendered. It must have been for—Another thought stirred in her brute brain.
They were raising Rickman in his bed before taking him away. His shoulders were supported on the nurse's arm, his head dropped on her breast. The posture revealed all the weakness of his slender body. The woman turned. And as she looked at the helpless figure she was visited by a dim sense of something strange and beautiful and pure, something (his helplessness perhaps) that was outraged by her presence, and called for vindication.
"'E never 'ad no truck with me," she said. It struck Maddox that the denial had a sublimity and pathos of its own. She dropped the bag into her lean bosom and went out.
And the porters wrapped him in his blankets, and laid him on a stretcher, and carried him out; past Maddox and Rankin who turned their heads away; past Flossie who shrank a little from the blankets, but cried softly to see him go; and past the woman standing on her threshold. And in that manner he passed Horace Jewdwine coming up the stair too late. And all that Jewdwine could do was to stand back and let him pass.
It was Jewdwine's fear that made him uncover, as in the presence of the dead.